Addressing The War, An Actor Stretches

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: December 9, 2006

Of all the movies being made about the war in Iraq, few have examined the burdens being shouldered by the families of the nation's fighting men and women. Fewer still have looked up close at the price paid by those who have lost a husband -- let alone a wife and mother.

Yet as the war entered its third year in 2005, and after the Pentagon and the Senate banned news photos of the flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers, John Cusack, the star of dozens of films, found himself yearning for a movie project that could cast a spotlight on an aspect of the war that the government was keeping largely off screen.

''If they're getting away with that, then your job as an artist in this era would be to tell the story of one of those coffins coming home,'' Mr. Cusack, 40, said in a telephone interview this week.

He said that he had also been looking for ''great acting challenges,'' but that he kept falling into leading man roles in comedies, romances and thrillers. ''It's still the studios, and they tend to offer you versions of what you've done,'' he said.

A few months later, however, Mr. Cusack found what he was looking for. A young screenwriter, James C. Strouse, whose first script, ''Lonesome Jim,'' had just been turned into a modestly praised dark comedy by Steve Buscemi, approached Mr. Cusack's production company with an idea about a man whose wife is killed in battle, and who then has to break the news to their two young daughters.

''Sometimes the universe works to meet you halfway,'' Mr. Cusack said.

Halfway, in that Mr. Strouse, whose previous filmmaking experience had occurred in his basement in high school, also planned to direct the film. But after a courtship of long talks about films and character, about Mr. Strouse's sense of the story and Mr. Cusack's desire to stretch -- Mr. Strouse recalled a look in Mr. Cusack's eye ''almost like a boy in a toy store'' as he discussed the role -- the two agreed to go forward.

The result of their collaboration is ''Grace Is Gone,'' a tiny, taut and, the makers hope, affecting entry in the dramatic competition at next month's Sundance Film Festival.

Mr. Strouse, 29, would seem to have led a charmed life. His first choice to direct ''Lonesome Jim,'' in which Casey Affleck played a depressed would-be writer who moves back in with his parents in Indiana, was Mr. Buscemi, who took the job; the film went to Sundance in 2005 before a small release by IFC Films last spring.

If that was not lucky enough, Mr. Strouse also wrote ''Grace Is Gone'' with Mr. Cusack in mind. After ''Lonesome Jim,'' Mr. Strouse's agents had arranged for him a series of brief ''Perrier meetings'' with Hollywood producers -- the meeting ends when the glass is empty -- but Mr. Strouse held his tongue about the Iraq-widower idea until he arrived at the office of Mr. Cusack's New Crime Productions.

''They had a basketball court in their office, and I love basketball,'' said Mr. Strouse, who after all is a Hoosier. Mr. Cusack's producing partner, Grace Loh, liked his pitch, and urged Mr. Strouse to put it to paper. (Another good omen: later that day Mr. Strouse spotted Mr. Cusack in the dairy aisle of a grocery. He did not introduce himself.)

Mr. Strouse's wife, Galt Niederhoffer, is a principal at Plum Pictures (''The Baxter,'' ''The Ground Truth''), and she already had financing in place. When Mr. Cusack finally committed to the project in late February, it was just a few weeks until shooting began. It was an exceptionally smooth path for any film, not least an indie.

Still, making a movie about Iraq without alienating supporters of the war was not easy, given that the writer-director and the actor-producer shared an antipathy for it. Mr. Cusack, after all, is now filming a dark farce of which he is a co-author, ''Brand Hauser,'' a Strangelovian satire about ''war and branding'' and the free-market philosophy that, he says, saw Iraq as a laboratory experiment. The film, being shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, is ''set in the next place that they'd invade, if this ideology had its way,'' Mr. Cusack said.

But both Mr. Cusack and Mr. Strouse said they wanted to avoid ''editorializing'' with ''Grace Is Gone.''

''I really think it can be deadly to have an agenda in telling fiction,'' Mr. Strouse said. ''I wanted to connect with people on an emotional level. And I thought the best way to do that was to try and play it as straight and true as I could. There was always the hope that this could somehow be above the argument, and challenge your opinions, whatever they are -- to not let anyone off too easily.''

His solution was to make Mr. Cusack's character, Stanley, a former soldier himself and a solid supporter of the war his wife had gone off to fight, and to set up a telling confrontation with the man's brother (Alessandro Nivola), a vocally antiwar slacker who does not understand the toll it is taking on Stanley. Mr. Strouse said he modeled Stanley on his own father, to a degree: ''In his youth he wanted to be Audie Murphy, but he had this condition with his eyes, and he lied his way into the service and got booted out.''

For his part, Mr. Cusack said he was mindful of Willy Loman. ''I thought of all the concrete this guy had poured into this structure that supported him in the certainty of his belief,'' he said. ''That rigidity was cracking by this transformative event in his life. At the same time, I really empathized with him. I wanted to get inside what it must be like to really believe in the mission, and give that character his dignity, and give that character his grief.''

Mr. Strouse asked military spouses about their ways of coping with deployment. He says he learned, for instance, that children should be allowed to watch the news only under supervision. When ''Grace Is Gone'' was shot last spring, just seven mothers had been reported killed in Iraq, Mr. Strouse said, but he found the widower of one for Mr. Cusack to interview.

''I asked him about the first three days of that grief,'' Mr. Cusack said. ''I asked him how he told his kids, what those conversations were like, what the feeling was like in his body. I probably just heard the music. But he told me a lot.''

The collaboration did not end when filming began. Mr. Strouse had crammed by reading up on directing, but he had to be told basic things, like to stand next to the camera rather than watch the action on a video monitor. Mr. Cusack ''was really kind of a mentor through a lot of the process,'' Mr. Strouse said.

The film was shot in the Chicago area, Mr. Cusack's old stamping grounds, and for help in coaching the two newcomers playing his daughters, Sh?n O'Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk, Mr. Cusack reached out to Joyce Piven, his old acting teacher, whose other former students include her son Jeremy and Lili Taylor.

His own performance, meanwhile, is unlike anything Mr. Cusack has done before, starting with a physical transformation -- achieved with a distinctly unhip hairstyle, chunky eyeglasses, tucked-in shirt and pigeon-toed, hunched-in gait -- that renders him almost incognito in the film's opening scenes.

Ms. Piven, who hung around the set to see him perform, remarked on Mr. Cusack's ''lack of vanity'' in the role, and praised him for creating his own opportunities as a producer. ''He has very wide range, unplumbed,'' she said. ''So I wasn't so surprised as happy that he's branching out, and he has the means to do it.''

Photo: John Cusack as a man whose wife is killed in Iraq in ''Grace Is Gone.'' (Photo by Jean-Louis Bompoint/Plum Pictures)(pg. B11)